With the Winter Meetings about to begin, here's what to expect from every National League team.

I'm not going to be in Indianapolis-with Kevin, Will, John, and Christina on-site, think of my absence as the Secretary of Agriculture being assigned to skip the State of the Union, to assure continuity of government should disaster strike. That doesn't mean I'm not as geeked for the Winter Meetings as any fan is. I'm not sure we'll get much in the way of transaction action, but the anticipation of movement makes for a fun four days.

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Working with Yankee-like expectations, the Red Sox have to strike a balance between short-term gains and long-term competitiveness.

I had a lot of fun Tuesday night, serving as a guest lecturer-really, Q&A target-for the Sabermetrics 101 class at Tufts University in Boston. Along with Baseball Information Systems' Steve Moyer, and at the behest of my friend Dr. Andy Andres, I got to spend a few hours talking about matters serious and otherwise with a group of students who, had this been 20 years earlier, might have been engaging in thrust-and-parry with Gary Huckabay, Clay Davenport, and others on rec.sport.baseball.

With the offers of arbitration in place, has the market corrected from last year's Type-A fiasco?

The deadline for offering arbitration to free agents passed last night, and once again a fairly small number of players received offers, just 23 of 70 ranked free agents. I've written in the past that for almost all ranked players, this should be a fairly simple decision: almost any player good enough to be a ranked free agent is good enough to warrant having back on a one-year deal with a salary determined through arbitration. Given that this offer is a necessary step in receiving draft-pick compensation for free agents-if you decline to offer arbitration, you forfeit the right to compensation-it's long been my contention that teams should err on the side of making the offer. The downside is very small.

Who's out there to toe the rubber at the start of ballgames, and who should you favor from among them?

There are very few good buys among the available starting pitchers. As with the first two pieces in this series, these pitchers are sorted by the chance that they'll return value on the contract they can be expected to sign.

Sorting through the available mercenaries in the outfield and behind the dish.

There are lots of free-agent catchers and outfielders, many of whom provide little or no bang for the buck. Again, these players are listed roughly in order of what I see as their chance of providing value for the contract they'll sign.

There are currently 170 free agents. John Grabow was the 171st, but that was before signing with the Cubs right after the list became official. Over the next couple of days, I'll cover every single one of the 170, with the infielders coming first. Players are listed by position, and ranked within their position subjectively by how good a value I think each can be as a free agent.

With the free-agent market set to open, teams should be wary of overpaying for the large fish in a small pond.

Come the morning, all six-year players who have declared free agency can sign with new teams. This isn't likely to trigger a wave of transactions-the players and their agents are technically not allowed to even talk to new teams until tomorrow-but it does begin the off-season feeding frenzy that will see hundreds of millions of dollars guaranteed to a group of players that, collectively, has nowhere to go but down.

Teams can improve themselves without paying too much if they know where to look.

One way to fill holes on a major league roster extremely cheaply is to find good values among minor league free agents. These aren't prospects, but players who are right around their career peaks, some even in their early thirties, who you pick up to fix an immediate problem for $400,000, and who if they work out can be an inexpensive three-year solution. The process of moving players from the minors to the majors is fairly efficient, but it isn't a perfect market, and mistakes and misevaluations are made. A strong front office is aggressive in tendering non-roster invitations to this pool of players; on the basis of a return on investment, the minor league free-agent pool is much more attractive than the major league one in general, and this winter's in particular.

One man's virtual ballot for the MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, and Manager of the Year awards.

In the excitement of the Twins/Tigers finish to the season and the quick run-up to the playoffs, I never published my Internet Baseball Awards ballots. Despite the late date-the BBWAA awards will be announced between now and Thanksgiving-these ballots do reflect only regular-season performance.

A recap of moves already made as the Hot Stove swiftly kicks into high gear.

The late start to the 2009 season and late end to it mean that we have a shortened offseason. Perhaps, then, I shouldn't have been surprised at how much activity we saw in the immediate aftermath of the World Series, with a trade being consummated even before the Yankee clubhouse had been cleaned. Still, the days following the Series feel like they've been busier than that period ever has been before. Let's get caught up:

Once again, the Gold Glove Awards were announced to a mix of applause, boos, and abject horror. The awards' legitimacy have been in question for years, as better ways of measuring defensive performance have come on line, and the patterns of awarding Gold Gloves-in some cases, like Supreme Court seats-became apparent. Gold Glove voting measures defensive reputation, rather than defensive skill or defensive performance, and while there are relationships among those things, giving out an award based on reputation isn't a valuable process.